Hospital Authority to Upgrade Wiring for Internet

MJ Kneiser

The Stephens County Hospital Authority is working on a plan to upgrade wiring for its wi-fi and Internet system.

At their meeting Monday evening, the Board voted to upgrade the system after hearing a presentation from Hospital CFO Jeff Laird.

Pointing to a chart of the current wiring system, Laird said the upgrade was necessary because the current wiring is antiquated and the potential for system failure is high.

“Currently, all these little red dots are closets located around the hospital and if we have an issue, every one of those are a fail point where we have to start running around trying to figure out what’s happening, what the problem is,” said Laird. “What we’ll be going to with the new wiring scheme is four main closets and everything will be wired out from there so it makes the system much more efficient, much less fail points.”

The new wiring would be Cat 6 Ethernet cabling and would double the hospital’s WI-fi points.

CAT 6, is a standardized twisted pair cable for Ethernet and other network physical layers.

Cisco is offering the hospital a sizable, end-of-fiscal-year price of $132,619 for the CAT 6 hardware – down from their standard price for Cat 6 cabling of just over $400, but the offer ends this week.

The total cost of the new wiring would be $242,908.

Hospital Administrator Lyn Anderson noted the upgraded wiring would eliminate dropped signals, making it more efficient for hospital personnel to use the Internet and WI-fi system.

Another purchase recommended by Anderson is an Interface Engine.

An interface engine is an interface or integration engine built specifically for the healthcare industry.

It connects legacy systems by using a standard messaging protocol.

Anderson said an interface engine will link two important systems hospital personnel need on a daily basis without the hospital having to pay extra.

“Any time we have a system that has to connect with CPSI, we have to build an interface and now we get a break on the cost of that interface,” said Anderson. “It costs us $3500 every time we interface the CPSI. We had purchased the new electronic medical record for the emergency department and it has to interface with OmniCell which is where we keep all the medications and it has to interface with CPSI. If we purchase this interface, we will be able to interface with anything and won’t have to pay a per interface charge every time a new system needs to interface.”

Laird said the interface engine would help eliminate delays for hospital workers when looking up medical records and medications.

“There are currently some delays on the floor where they’re doing medication scanning,” said Laird. “And it’s trying to communicate back to the main system, if it’s going through all these mesoswitches, that delay, this would hopefully help that aspect of it as well.”

Total cost of both purchases would be $341,908.

After coming out of Executive Session to discuss the purchases, the Board voted unanimously to upgrade the system and purchase the interface engine.